Results of a 5 week 7th Grade Game Design Project

Just wanted to share the results of a 5 week game development unit done with my 7th Graders in Stencyl. We did a few examples from the educator resources than went into building our own games. I tried to be as hands off as possible having the pairs of students drive to learn from using examples, resources and documentation. We made some unique art in Piskell that came out amazingly, the 7th graders loved the art aspect of it. Overall a huge success and the students are all super proud of themselves. I certainly want to come back to Stencyl later in the classroom, maybe with a deeper dive into game design at its core.

I just finished playing all of them. I was really impressed. There were a few that used the jump and run or other kits - it would have been nice seeing those made from scratch. Even if they were buggy, the students would have learned more about programming trying it out for themselves.

I hope your students decide to develop these further. There were some great concepts in there - e.g. bees flying around flowers, girls collecting pants, running around the school, skiing, etc.

I just finished playing all of them. I was really impressed. There were a few that used the jump and run or other kits - it would have been nice seeing those made from scratch. Even if they were buggy, the students would have learned more about programming trying it out for themselves.

My rule was that they had to have at least one custom event or behavior. Mostly they used the examples for score and game attributes in these custom events, and stuck to behaviors for movement. Ultimately, the logic of variables like a score and conditionals to move between levels were the more valuable lesson for this age group I think. Granted many of them were fairly buggy. I did go through and clean most of them up, mostly collision boxes & groups were the biggest issue they ran into.

My complaint was more about seeing the black rectangle with the green and red lines indicating on ground, jump and sliding on the wall. In my opinion, a big lesson for that age group is that you should not be using other people's assets. You cannot copyright game mechanics, but using other people's art/sound assets is plagiarism. Sure the those things are in stencylforge as creative commons, but you never know if the person who uploaded it stole them from the original owner and posted the assets as free to use.

I always tell my students to make their own assets even in demo games.